#thexhierarchy

He knew it wasn’t the smartest of ideas, but there was this nagging feeling that he knew the answer to the sickness.  They had brought in three more patients that night with it.  Hysteria was wanting to brew, and that unsettled Gareth -- bringing back bad memories.  Memories that he wished to never relive.  Valencia had told him to trust these feelings -- this pulls, but to be cautious.

Gareth was ignoring part of that.

Grady had taken Sable home.  A storm was coming in from the West, meaning the lightning bug needed to be home.  Storms could be hard on her.  It was that opening that left him to his own devices for a few hours, which lead him back to the hospital.  Gareth was leaning with his back against the wall nearest the side exit, waiting for the one nurse that he was sure wasn’t all human.

She had been separated from Alec first, then Theo, and now she was running FOR HER LIFE. She wondered if Connor was watching her from home. She missed her older brother. She missed working with animals, she missed firing homemade arrows into the forest instead of people, she missed---

A SCREAM made her run faster.

Her lungs couldn’t keep up with it. At 4′11, she could only run so fast.

She cleared a room. A FAST figure raced out from the shadows and slammed the door shut, the sound of bodies being THROWN UP against the flimsy door greeting her ears. One of the mutts had her by the hair. They went falling to the ground. Then, Ellie was stabbing it in the head with her knife, again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again----

@atasteofeuphoria (stabby stab stab)

Morgan pulled her off.

He wasn’t a kind man. And he was never one to comfort. But--- he took Ellie off of the limp body of a madman, and brought her shaking form to his chest. It would take just a movement of his arms to snap her neck. Except-- well, except Roan was there. Ellie fought against him. All at once the fought fled from her and she was sobbing loudly into Morgan’s chest.

When he came to, it was staring down at a kilometer’s worth of a steep fall. His head spun. He was barely holding himself up on the frame of a door. The floor to ceiling window stared back out at him, inviting him, silently asking him--- what would happen if you stepped here?

 Morgan stepped away with great effort. He must be in the skyscraper that he had seen before he had blacked out after drinking Clarke’s blood. It still tasted like dirt in his mouth. But the important part was that he could breathe. 

 He looked at his hands. Covered in blood. He looked out at the city. Not yet morning.  The vampire could not remember which lives he took. The taking of the lives never brought him pleasure to begin with. He must have gone into a frenzy once he left the cornucopia. Weakly, Morgan stumbled along the creaky hallway, one slow foot step at a time.                       He heard a heart beat.                      He also remembered that scent.

Oliver stood by his locker, chatting with his friend Carl during the changeover. He laughed at some corny joke the other made while placing unneeded textbooks into his locker. The chatter in the hallway was something Ollie was still surprised by since transferring, along with the regular announcements. A call for a pupil to attend the principal’s office was read out, but it would be a surprise if anyone actually took any notice. 

He continued to stand, making idle smalltalk with Carl before the period bell rang, causing a symphony of slamming lockers to call out through the hall as the other students made their way to class. The boys bid farewell, and Oliver headed to his English classroom, slipping in behind a group of girls and taking his place on the third seat back of the second row. 

As time passed, Ollie didn’t give a second thought to the empty seat beside him, that was until a boy appeared in the doorway, looking somewhat ruffled and angry. He thought he heard a mumbled apology before the boy was dropping into the seat beside him. The professor simply rolled his eyes and turned back to the board. Oliver found himself looking at the other’s bloody knuckles as he copied from the board, and curiosity got the better of him.

“Depends–are you looking for sex or actual sleep?”

Well, he didn’t so much like the look of him as like how vulnerable he looked. He was able to walk right up to the boy and wrap an arm around his waist, something his own tributes would never allow. He trailed his fingers along the boy’s back as he moved around him, inspecting him up close.

 ----He had been in here since morning, and he had hardly broken a sweat upon his fair brow. He started out with working out at the weights as a warm up. Then, he was on hand to hand battle. He had conquered one of the tributes already-- a skinny guy from District 4 who was all wiry with no grace -- and was sorely disappointed at what the reaping had brought up this year.

 Oh, he watched. He wasn’t just here to show off. He was eyeing up the competition. He was here to show the weaker ones what they were up against and to show the stronger ones who they should ally with. A career. 

 The one from district 4 was gone, and his eyes fell on a freckled boy that he couldn’t quite make sense of just yet.